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I have been reading some very informative articles on changing over to ACHI from SATA drivers after Windows 7 been installed.

Well, I am trying to switch an Asus M487TD/USB3 board Dual booted with Vista 32bit and Windows 7-64 installed over to AHCI after getting a Corsair Force GT 120 SSD.

Got Win 7 partition all image over to the new SSD and it is now the Boot drive. I completed the registry hack part of the procedure done on both Win 7 and Vista partitions (was not Absolutely sure if that needed to be done but it made sense to do it). Then I went into Win 7 BIOS (SATA port 1) and switched over the controller to AHCI, saved and rebooted, black screen found no HDD went back into BIOS no HDD were detected not even the SATA DVD, changed back to SATA, booted OK went into registry and confirmed that the MSACHI was set to 0.

Anyone have any other ideas as to what went wrong? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated, I just want to get all the performance I paid for.

Alois Mahdal
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HAllenld
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  • If it is an intel based motherboard there is another registry start value that needs to be set to 0, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IastorV – Moab Jan 22 '12 at 04:03
  • possible duplicate of [Howto enable AHCI mode after Windows Vista install in IDE mode and before/for Windows 7 clean install?](http://superuser.com/questions/94223/howto-enable-ahci-mode-after-windows-vista-install-in-ide-mode-and-before-for-wi) – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 Jan 22 '12 at 16:30
  • Thanks Alois for the reply, No it an AMD 3 board. The error I getting is "Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key" which is the same problem that "Reinstalling AHCI SATA drivers after BIOS update(on the right), in his case his drive letter changed, mind did not, although it is a different drive and will have a different ID number. I was also looking for the AHCI drivers cant find them on the win7 upgrade disk? – HAllenld Jan 23 '12 at 01:27

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This is very difficult to accomplish but is possible. I have achieved this in the past by using an add-on SATA card. Any cheap PCI/PCI-e SATA card will work. I call it a swing install:

  1. Switch motherboard back over to compilable/SATA mode. I say that you’re safe with 2-3 successful reboots in compatible/SATA mode. You may not need that many, but it won’t hurt.
  2. Install the PCI/PCIe SATA controller. (It doesn’t have to be a fancy one.) Make sure the drivers are installed correctly. Leave the OS drive plugged into a motherboard connector. Windows should detect the card without problem.
  3. Reboot two or three times.
  4. Shutdown and install a SATA DVD or sacrificial SATA hard-drive on the add-on SATA card.
  5. Reboot two or three more times, and make sure it is fully accessible in Windows.
  6. Now, shutdown and move your OS drive to the add-on card.
  7. It should boot successfully. Give yourself another 2-3 successful reboots.
  8. Switch the Motherboard SATA controller over to AHCI mode and install your drivers like any for other expansion card.
  9. Two or three more reboots.
  10. Plug your sacrificial SATA drive into a motherboard SATA port, while leaving the OS drive on the add-on SATA card.
  11. Once this drive works, shutdown and move your OS drive back to the motherboard controller.
Synetech
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TheSavo
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  • Insanely useful for converting a win7 virtualvox vm image to hyperV : virtualbox defaults to a SATA controller, and you need to move the drive over to IDE this way, before shutting down and converting the drive image to vhdx with qemu-img.exe You just add the virtual controller as appropriate in virtual box, add tiny extra drive to it, boot up and let windows add the new controller type, etc. Works! Otherwise you just get a BSOD on boot in Hyper V – RGD2 Feb 16 '23 at 07:48